Profitable Niches

Finding Profitable Niches

Today we are going to take those keywords you have found and analyze them to see if they really are profitable niche keywords. The first way I will show you is using a free keyword research tool.  The second is a niche marketing software that has a free evaluation version. Even if you can afford the software I think it is important for you to learn to use the free tool first to help you get an understanding of the principals involved in finding really good keywords with a small amount of competition yet enough organic search traffic to make them worth while.

The free tool is a web application so there is nothing to install. So grab your list of keywords and go to freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends.

Wordtracker Keyword Research Tool

Type your first keyword into the search field and click the Hit Me button and a list of up to 100 keyword search results will appear. These are longtail keyword phrases within your chosen niche. On the left are the number of searches on the right is an icon that looks like a graph. For this example I had typed “hybrid cars” into the search field. The list is actual search phrases that people have used to look for information on hybrid cars.

Now if we click on the graph icon it will show us an analysis of that keyword phrase.

Profitable Keywords

It turns out that “best hybrid cars” looks like one of those golden nuggets! The goal is to find a keyword phrase that has a daily search of at least 100 AND less than 30,000 pages competing for that phrase. This particular one meets both qualifications and is worth investigating further.

Normally I would do this same investigation of every single keyword that appeared on the list and you should do that when you are doing your research because sometimes you get really lucky and find several potential gems in the bunch. This also helps you eliminate the ones that are not good choices. You do not want to make the mistake of optimizing your website or blog for the wrong keywords.

Now we know that keyword phrase meets our search and competition criteria but does it meet our profitablity criteria? At the bottom of the window there will be 3 different Google links. Click on the first one.

Keyword profitibility on Google

Now you are looking to see if people are actually buying products for that keyword. Look on the left to see if people are selling products within the niche. A pretty good indicator that this is a profitable niche is also the fact that people are spending money to run Adword campaigns for this keyword. If there was no money to be made in the niche people would not be spending money to advertise it.

The next link in the list is the Google +Affiliates. This will bring up a search for anyone running an affiliate program within the niche. You might want to sign up to sell someone else’s products within your niche. This could be an alternative to creating your own product or as a complimentary item to go with  your product.

The final link is the Google regions.

Google Regions results

Now this info is kind of important since Google has changed to supplying regional results in their search engines. We are looking at the red bars of the graph. This tells us that the USA is first, Canada second, followed by the UK and Australia. So why is this important?

You must know your market and how to reach it. If I was using this niche, living in Canada, I would want to make sure that I was hosting my website on a USA web host in order to hit the greatest number of search results in the USA. If the UK had come out on top I would want to host the site with a UK web host. This is because when someone in that country does a search on Google they will automatically be shown local sites before they are shown international sites.

Now look at the cities on the right. This shows us that Miami and New York and Toronto are the top cities searching for information on hybrid cars. Why is this important?

When it comes time to drive traffic to your site through social marketing you would want to pay special attention to getting backlinks in sites that people from those cities frequent.

Are you beginning to see how important these little things are to your profits? Most other website owners do not know this stuff! Now you do and you have an advantage over them and the ability to rank higher than them in Google as a result.

So that is how you can manually find profitable niches using free keyword research tools. Take your time and go through all of the 5 hot niches you have chosen. Don’t worry if this takes you a few days. It IS important to your success.

In the next lesson I will introduce you to a powerful industry leading software to speed up the process of keyword research.

Lesson 5